Surface Tension - Chapter 11

Chapter 11

I’m awake.

            Through heavy eyes I try and take in the new day.  I can’t remember going to sleep.  I was awake, watching the digital numbers slowly change and then, I’m here curled tight in the arm chair. There’s a hand gently resting on my right shoulder. A blurry shape comes into focus: it’s Bill. She's smiling, looking straight into my eyes.  Her lips move. I can’t make out what she saying as the last vestiges of sleep still cling to me.  Cold water splashes on my face, a small explosion that jolts me closer to full sentience.

“Hey!”

Her black hair is wet.  It glows, highlighting colours and shades that I didn't know were there.  Dark reds, quiet blues, vibrant purples that together become a sheen of velvet black.  Her face is framed tightly by the gloriously damp hair.  A droplet forms at the end of a stand, growing bigger with expectation until finally gravity kicks in.  It falls and detonates on my hand.  For I moment I imagine I can see the droplet flattens as it hits, it compresses until the energy transfers from downwards to outwards and shatters in a perfect crown of beads.

            “Hello sleepy head.  You were out cold when I woke up so I left you there.  You needed the sleep.”  She’s kneeling in front of the chair, hands now resting on the arms either side of me.

            “What time is it?” My head's engulfed in a huge yawn.

            Bill checks sideways, hair dancing as one, showering me with tiny particles of water, “Oh gone 11:30 I think.  I’ve only been up for half an hour or so.”  She rises and stretches, extending her arms straight above her head.  The dressing gown she's wearing, my dressing gown, rises with her revealing her milky calves.  She catches my glance.

            “Sorry. Needed a shower and I thought I’d slob a bit.  All I could find,” she puts on her best little girl lost look, “was your dressing gown. That OK?” 

It's way too big for her. Now the feline stretch is over its hem drags on the floor.

“Looks like you need a shower Mr Dafoe to get you going.  What time did you fall asleep last night?” She starts to stand, “Before you shower, do you want some breakfast?  I’ve just put…”  Bill’s voice trails off as the acrid smell of burnt toast wafts in to the room “Oh…”

The smoke alarm kicks in. It’s in the hall. I can see it’s little red light flashing urgently. The sound reverberates, making the room throb.

            I awkwardly push myself from the chair.  My legs are reluctant to work and standing I catch the edge of the dressing gown.  Bill's trying to get up too. She stumbles and grabs for me.  I’m off balance, and lurch sideways. We fall rolling together across the floor until we are beached against the settee, a tangled heap, without co-ordination or orientation.

The alarm keeps its incessant high pitched beeping going.  It’s painful.

            “Oh please, please shut up,” yells Bill. 

            We try again, but I’m now caught and we fail.  I find a shoe; one of Bill’s discarded when she curled up last night. I roll over on to my back and with one seamless move hurl the shoe at the alarm. Somehow I’ve got the angle just right.  The shoe, like some rogue spinning satellite sales through the sitting room door and hits the alarm squarely in the middle with a plastic-y crash. 

The alarm stops.

The noise drops until all that is left is a vague ringing in my ears.

            “I can’t believe you did that.”  Bill rolls over on to her stomach so that her face is a few inches from mine.  She's laughing. “What do you do? Sit at home and practise?  No wonder you never come out.”

            I push her away, following her as she rolls back.  I find myself looking down at her.  Her face is wide with excitement. The laugh fades to an inviting smile.  Her eyes half close and I can feel the moist, warm touch of her breathe on my face. We are drifting closer.  Her lips part in invitation. And then…

            The alarm goes off.

            “Toast!”  exclaims Bills.  She jerks away from me, rolling round on to her stomach, then on to all fours and finally erect.  “You get the alarm I’ll deal with the toast.”

            I'm left with the shadow of intimacy.

 

When I return refreshed from the shower, the sleep washed away but a cramp of uncertainty in my stomach, I find that the kitchen table has been laid; plates are set out; a couple of mugs, a milk jug and somehow Bill’s found a toast rack, which is full.  An open jar of marmalade sits next to a spoon sitting decorously in the upturned lid.  The only thing that lets it down is the plastic tub of margarine.   Bill hovers angelically by the table clearly pleased with what she has been able to rustle up in an alien environment.

            “I’m overwhelmed Bill, such a display of domesticity, I didn’t think you had it in you.” 

            “Oi  you! For that you can butter your own toast”

            “Its marge.”

“Well, I can’t help it if my host is a cheapskate.”

“Touché!” I wriggle into a seat. “You know, I’m really hungry, this is just what I need.” I take a slurp of coffee. “You OK?”

She’s changed, closed in. She looks deflated. I reach out to touch her shoulder but she jerks away, twists and slides behind the table.

“Bill, what?”

            “This. It's something I’d do for Jonah if he’d been working late.  I’d let him sleep until he was ready, tiptoeing round the house not to wake him.  And then he’d wake to this.”  She spreads her hands gesturing to the laid table.  “I’d cut flowers from the garden too,” she manages a weak smile, “but of course you don’t have that option.” She bows her head and begins to work on a piece of toast.

            I’ve got nothing to say so silence seems to be the best way forward. I work my way through what's on the table glancing up at Bill every now and then but she’s turned in on herself.

The silence stretches. I weigh my options. As far as I can see it I can play it two ways, play it cool, exonerate Jonah, invite her to respond or push it, challenge her.

I chew meditatively, “So,” I say through a mouth full of toast, “what now?” Bill doesn’t look up. “I think we should review where we are and then we can decide what to do next.”  I look at her. She continues to eat. There are crumbs on her upper lip.  I want to wipe them off. It’s easier to keep talking, “OK, so from my perspective we may we've found something,” she doesn’t respond. I keep with the summing up, “But the link to Jonah is tenuous at best,” I pause, she’s not registered anything, not even the reference to Jonah. “What £500K is doing in a locker of recently deceased bloke maybe the stuff of thrillers but it’s hardly our concern.  I can’t see how this relates to Jonah and to be honest Bill, I’m not sure where this goes from here.” I’m pleased with this, smugly so; I’ve been the bigger man.

            Bill leans back in her chair, resting her head on the wall behind her.  She tilts her head backward, revealing her pale neck, sinews taut.  She closes her eyes in concentration. Finally she drops her head so that it's level with mine. Her eyes remain shut, her head bobs. Is she is visualising the words she’s about to say, conjuring them out of the blackness into the light?  She places her hands calmly in front of her, open’s her eyes and says:

            “I’m sorry Tony, maybe I should have said something last night but it was all so big, so hurried.  It was a huge rush, like when you're a kid on a fairground ride. You feel both excitement and fear, you know? That's what it's like now.  I can’t expect you to understand, because well, because you don’t see things from my perspective, you can’t because, well, you're not me and you don’t know what it's been like over the past few months.” Nervously, I lay my hand on the table, tantalisingly short of her arm. “I understand what you're saying Tony. But I can’t let him off like that.  You see, that key, the one Jonah said he knew nothing about it, lead to that locker. You know, Tony we found it, we were about to give up but we found it.” 

            The gaze has burnt out. She lets her eyes fall to the table.  For a moment she traces the knots in the wooden table top with a finger. She's gathering herself again.  With careful precision Bill places her hands palm down on the table, allowing her thumbs to drop beneath so she is gripping the table.  She raises her eyes to hold my gaze and as she does so I can see that her knuckles whiten.

            “I expected the locker key to be Jonah’s, I really, really did.  I knew he had gone behind my back.  But even if it isn’t his I know there has to be a connection, I know between him and the key.  I didn’t see it last night, the money thing really threw me but at one level it proved to me that he'd been dishonest. He'd lied and it's got something to do with his work. You see, when we first married there was very little we didn’t talk about.  We did the usual stuff together; though he was always a bit vague I went along to his work do’s and well, you know he came with me on ours.”

            I catch the taste of bile in my mouth.  I remember uncomfortable nights in cramped bars trying to re-capture the student feeling though we had grown beyond it, I’d try and steer clear of Jo.  I always made sure it was a large group to go out with so our lack of contact wouldn't be obvious. 

            “Gradually we drifted into different orbits, I suppose. I began to sense that Jonah wasn’t happy out with me and…“ she pauses and carefully looks at me “…you.”  She lets this hang. She licks her lips then sips from her mug, her lips blooming white under the pressure against the rim. Her voice is getting quieter. She's retreating into herself.  Her focus shifts so it on my hands on the table.  “It wasn't that what he did no-longer fitted with me, it was more that our paths didn’t seem to chime altogether.  It was you,” and here she lets her pale green eyes roll up to meet mine fleetingly and for the first time I think I realise she knows my, our history and what could've been.  “It was you and others, he just didn’t want to be around. He’d moved on. I think he thought we were holding him back.” She gently swills the coffee in her mug allowing it to build up velocity until finally it crests the lip of the mug, rolling down its side until it silently splashes on the table.

            I should say something, but I don’t have the words.

            “More coffee please,” there’s a hitch in her voice as she offers me her mug. I shuffle bare foot across the kitchen and work the coffee machine. With my back to her she says:

            “To be honest I can’t say it was just Jonah.  I’m at fault too.  I saw he wasn't interested so I just gave up. I let bits of me become remote.  It becomes more and more of an effort to explain and so you don’t.  Same for him too I think; he could see I wasn’t interested so why bother.”

            I turn, mug in hand, and pad back. I push the mug across the table to her. She ignores it.

            “You see, that's the thing. Yesterday, last night there was something, a connection.   I was touching Jonah in some way finding about him.  I know the key was not for his locker, but you see the name, the man whose name it was…”

            “McClelland, Sandy McClelland,”

            “Yes, him,” Bill is pleased with the name.  “You see, I know the name.  He was a client that Jonah was involved with.  I don’t know what it was about but Jonah did things for him.  Most of his clients I wouldn’t know about, but him I did.”  Bill's speaking with a quiet urgency now. “You see we’d got date, me and Jonah, it was an anniversary or something and I’d actually cooked something.  But then I got this phone call from Jonah as he was leaving the office that he was needed to do something for this McClelland.  I was in bed that night by the time Jonah made it home.  If we’d had a dog, the dinner would have been in it.  It happened again, a makeup meal which Jonah organised. I got this forlorn call from the office that he'd stuff to do for McClelland.  I was angry that time.  I went to bed pretending to be asleep but as soon as he was in the room I told him exactly what I felt.  He just acknowledged things, said this was what was required of him, what did I expect, I liked living a certain way and if I thought that being a librarian was going to keep me in the things I liked.  Well, in short, it was the first time we slept apart.” She’s focused on me, daring me to look away. “Every time Jonah was late it was to do with this man.  It began as doing a good job to impress the boss, but it became more than that. Yeah, the firm was pleased and they wanted more but Jonah knew it wasn’t right. He was guilty, I’d get stuff left, little presents and the like; sometimes quite expensive.” She takes I sharp in take of breathe which masks a sob, “But I never got what I really wanted which was him.” A solitary tear breaches her left eyelid. She sighs, a sigh that would wreck ships at sea. “We couldn't talk about it, we ended up fighting.  That's what the key was all about.   It had nothing to do the clubs or money; it was an excuse to let him know that I felt I was drowning. Or he was drowning. Or maybe we both were. Whatever, there was no one to rescue us.” The tear has tracked its way to her chin. She wipes it away with the sleeve of the dressing gown.  She shivers. “You cold?  I am.” She wraps the dressing gown tighter folding her arms across herself. Her head drops and then very quietly she asks:

“Will you help me Tony?  I feel as if I am drifting apart, molecule by molecule.  Each day there’s a little less of me.  I’m eroding and I want it to stop.”